Today, La Perla owner Luka Bubalo is a man of many interests. He loves cycling, basketball, running, skiing, surfing, Nordic walking… and if all that sounds implausibly healthy, he's also got a soft spot for an exceptional bottle of red. It wasn't always thus. At one stage, “I was a very boring guy!” he laughs, in his typical self-effacing manner. While his university friends were out flirting, drinking and partying, “all I wanted to do was talk about yachts”, he recalls. “Whenever I had a gap between exams I was down at the marina.”
Bubalo grewup in the historic town of Split, the largest coastal city in Croatia, whose centre is a listed UNESCO World Heritage Site. Living so close to the country's famously beautiful waters, and with a family holiday home in a small bay near Rogoznica on the Dalmatian Coast, he spent his childhood years messing around on the sea – including on board various small motor yachts that his family occasionally chartered in the
